Interesting Guardian article re Biden’s openness as president. But comments made by historian Jon Meacham re Republican voter base frustration is telling:

In March, Jon Meacham put together a meeting between Biden and a group of fellow historians at the White House that lasted more than two hours. What did he learn about the 46th president?

“He’s like an upside down iceberg,” the Pulitzer prize-winning historian says by phone. “You see most of it and that’s not spin: there’s just not a lot of mystery to Joe Biden. The last four or five minutes of his press conference in the East Room [on 25 March] when he talked about democracy and autocracy, that was pretty much it.”

[…]

Republicans made campaign promises in election after election but failed to follow through,[Meacham] argues, resulting in a buildup of frustration among their voters. “We haven’t had a major political party of ours lose its bearings so profoundly perhaps in American history. I wanted to try to give a historically informed understanding of why this has happened now on the grounds that if you have a diagnosis, then at least you can think about treatments.

“I don’t think Trump emerged out of the ether. This was a long time coming because the base itself has been disenchanted and aggrieved by the paucity of the fruits of victory going back to world war two. It’s not just that Trump himself has superpowers; it’s a matter of context. The podcast is basically my understanding of why so many otherwise sensible Republicans signed on to a cult of personality.”[…]

theguardian.com